This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

Within 50 years of the first email being sent, everything from election systems, power grids, nuclear power plants, gas pipelines to hospital systems can be held hostage with ransomware. Nicole Perlroth starts from the Cold War era to explain how we got here. With many interesting stories, and a hard-hitting, engaging narrative, it’s an absolute must-read on an escalating war with consequences that impact all of us.

Uncharted

This is an excellent framing for the times we live in. We’re in a complex age, and we continue to try to make it certain and efficient using everything from personality tests to AI. But this is at the risk of losing the things that got us here- from scenario planning to creativity, imagination, and shared understanding. Great perspectives and a very accessible narrative style.

Weapons of Math Destruction

Cathy O’Neil does a great job of highlighting the dark side of “software is eating the world” as biases are being codified into systems as Weapons of Math Destruction. Multiple examples are used to understand the three characteristics of this phenomenon – scale, opacity and damage. “Algorithms are opinions embedded in code”, and right now, we’re not doing a great job of it.